Michael Swickard's new novel about New Mexico

From the Weekly Standard - When Mexican president Felipe Calderón leaves office on December 1, his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, will inherit a country with rampant corruption and high levels of drug-related violence. Of course, when Calderón entered the presidency six years ago, he himself inherited a country with rampant corruption and high levels of drug-related violence.
To appreciate his legacy, we must recall that Mexico was not enjoying peace in December 2006. Powerful drug cartels were already at war with each other, and the government was already fighting back. Security analyst Viridiana Ríos of Harvard has shown that the violence began to increase as early as 2004.
If anyone doubts that, consider these Mexican news items from late 2004 and early 2005:
* In December 2004, U.S. consul Michael Yoder told Reuters that at least 22 American citizens had either disappeared or been kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo over the previous four months.
* On January 21, 2005, after six prison workers were executed by drug traffickers in the city of Matamoros (which sits next door to Brownsville, Texas), President Fox vowed to wage the “mother of all battles” against those responsible for the killings.The new president, a member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), basically had four options: 1.) Confront the drug cartels with federal, state, and local police forces. 2.) Confront them with the military. 3.) Try to cut a deal with the cartels that would allow them to continue most of their criminal activities, provided they kept the violence to a minimum. 4.) Ignore them and hope for the best. Read more

The Center for Biological Diversity
filed a lawsuit Wednesday in a bid to push federal wildlife officials into
making rule changes, first recommended 11 years ago, to increase the population
of the endangered Mexican gray wolf.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal
court in Arizona,
marks the latest chapter in a year’s long effort to get the Fish and Wildlife
Service to amend project rules that environmentalists and biologists say have hindered
the wolf recovery effort.

At the start of 2012, there were 58 wolves in
national forests in southeast Arizona and
southwest New Mexico,
far below the 100 that biologists estimated would be roaming wild by the end of
2006.

In June 2001, three years after the first release of wolves in Arizona, a review team
of wolf experts recommended three key changes be made “immediately” to the
program.

Recounts
are set to start next week in two close New
Mexico legislative races that will determine the strength
of the Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives.

The state Canvassing Board on Tuesday ordered the
recounts to start Dec. 4. The recounts are required under state law because the
margin between the candidates is less than one-half of 1 percent.

There’s a
tie in a Southern New Mexico race between Republican Rep. Terry McMillan and
Democrat Joanne Ferrary, both of Las
Cruces. Each received 6,247 votes, according to
results certified by the board. The district covers portions of DoñaAnaCounty.

There was a
66-vote margin in a race for an Albuquerque-area House seat, with Republican
Paul Pacheco of Albuquerque
leading Democrat Marci Blaze of Corrales. The district covers parts of Sandoval
and Bernalillo counties.

AHD Note: Mayfield High School Grad Austin Trout will defend his championship belt against Miguel Cotto Saturday December 1st. Las Crucen, former championship boxer and Trout's head trainer Louie Burke will join News New Mexico Friday morning. RingTV - Much has been made about Miguel Cotto – a four-time former titleholder in three divisions and one of the sport's biggest stars – and his perceived home court advantage going into Saturday's fight at Madison Square Garden. Cotto (37-3, 30 knockouts), of Caguas, Puerto Rico, will be vying for the WBA junior middleweight title held by Austin Trout (25-0, 14 KOs), of Las Cruces, New Mexico, in front of what is sure to be a heavily pro-Cotto crowd. Cotto's popularity in The Big Apple is so that at Wednesday afternoon's final press conference, MSG Executive Vice President of Sports Bookings Joel Fisher handed Cotto a commemorative "Golden Ticket" for selling over 100,000 tickets in his eight appearances at "The Mecca of Boxing." Cotto has gone 7-0 in those fights. Trout, though undefeated, isn't as celebrated in America, having fought many of his signature wins in other countries like Mexico, Panama and Canada. Still, despite having never previously competed in New York or the Northeast region for that matter, Trout's familial ties give him a sense of home. “I always say, I'm more New York than Miguel Cotto is,” said Trout, whose mother and grandmother were both Brooklyn natives, and whose father was born in Harlem. “I've been coming back and forth to New York since I was a little boy. I'm not new to the city.” Read More News New Mexico

A college
scholarship that's bankrolled by the state lottery may become merit-based or
granted on financial need, New Mexico's
Senate majority leader has acknowledged.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that Sen. Michael Sanchez told a
summit organized by University
of New Mexico student
leaders that his long-held stance that the scholarship should be available to
all New Mexican students, regardless of financial need or academic
accomplishments, might have to change.

That's because a Legislative Finance
Committee reported in September that the scholarship fund is projected to run
out of money in the next fiscal year. Sanchez says making the scholarship
needs-based may be something that has to happen.

But Sanchez, who helped draft
the bill creating the program in 1996, said he would oppose making the
scholarship merit-based, using himself as an example of a student who didn't
perform well in high school but went on to graduate from UNM.

The state Supreme Court has denied a
petition from teacher unions, which had asked to court to strike down the
state’s new teacher evaluation system on the basis that it violated the
separation of powers in the state Constitution. After two attempts to overhaul
the teacher evaluation system through legislation, the Public Education
Department instead wrote administrative rules that required teacher evaluations
to be based in part on student test score improvement.

The state chapter of the
American Federation of Teachers and its Albuquerque
chapter argued that changes constitute a major policy change, and that policy
change is the job of legislators, not executive departments.

New
Mexico's largest county jail has announced that it will no longer
provide methadone treatment to inmates.

MetropolitanDetentionCenter officials said
Tuesday that all inmates who are currently incarcerated and receiving methadone
will undergo a "discontinuation process" during the next several
weeks.

Official say the move was made out of health concern for inmates. The
methadone program was initiated at the MDC by the New Mexico Department of
Health in 2006. Officials say pregnant women will continue to receive methadone
through their pregnancies.

Methadone is a synthetic opioid that is used as part
of a drug addiction detoxification and maintenance program.

A New Mexico peanut butter plant has laid off
a third of its 150 workers after federal authorities shuttered the plant.

A
salmonella outbreak traced to the peanut butter has sickened 41 people in 20
states.

Millions of pounds of the regions prized sweet Valencia
peanuts sit in barns at the Sunland peanut butter plant. Farmers are worried
about getting paid. And residents wonder what toll the shutdown will have on
the region's economy.

The tension boiled over on Monday, when the Food and Drug
Administration suspended Sunland's registration to operate because of repeated
safety violations. It came just as the plant was set to resume shelling the
bumper crop.

State and local government workers
and educators could see their take-home pay shrink in the next several years
under proposals to have them contribute more of their salaries for retirement
benefits.

A legislative panel on Wednesday endorsed a pair of proposals
to shore up the long-term finances of two programs for public employees — the
retirement system for educators and a separate program offering health
insurance to retirees from state and local government jobs as well as public
schools and universities.

One proposal calls for nearly 62,000 educators to pay
an extra $46 million over two years into their pension system. Under another
measure, 133,000 public employees, including educators, would pay $30 million
over three years for retiree health care while taxpayers pay $60 million more.